I'm director of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at the Cronkite School at Arizona State. I'm also author of the Forbes eBook Curbing Cars: America's Independence From The Auto Industry. I was Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times, and led Changing Gears, a public media project that studied the industrial Midwest. E: vmaynard@umich.edu T @mickimaynard @curbingcars

The UAW's Last-Ditch Push To Organize Southern Car Plants

UAW President Bob King has his eye on a prize: to organize a Southern car plant.

The United Auto Workers union has won many battles with the car companies, with legendary achievements like fully paid health care benefits, cost of living allowances and vacation days that many employees can only dream of.

But until now, it has failed to achieve its biggest goals: organizing the big foreign-owned car plants across the American South.

Yes, the UAW represented workers at joint venture plants run by General MotorsGeneral Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and it represents workers at a handful of foreign parts operations. However, those big prizes have eluded it.

Now, writes Nick Bunkley in Automotive News, the union is putting on a multi-state, multi-company push to finally win representation at plants across the South. The effort is vital to the legacy of UAW president Bob King, who will leave office in 2014.

“Through a strategy of coalescing global unions, civil rights activists and political figures, King has engineered a broad push into a decidedly hostile corner of the country,” Bunkley writes.

Last month, the UAW claimed to have won over a majority of workers at the two-year-old Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, and support from within VW for establishing a German-style works council at the plant helped swing its mission from improbable to promising. That outcome is not final, and eight workers have filed complaints claiming the union coerced VW workers.

In addition to Chattanooga, the UAW is focusing on the Mercedes-BenzMercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Ala., and the Nissan factory in Canton, Miss.

“If we complete Volkswagen and get an agreement there, that will help with all the other transplants,” King said in an interview with Automotive News last week. “Volkswagen would be a real breakthrough in American labor-management relations.”

The move by the union comes with it involved in another high stakes game — its move to force an initial public offering for Chrysler in an effort to win a dispute with Fiat over the company’s valuation.

Many experts have said that the UAW’s inability to organize the Southern plants, which stretch from South Carolina to Texas, and Indiana to Georgia, stems from states’ Right to Work laws. These prevent unions from automatically collecting dues from workers at sites where they are organized.

But another reason is a political miscue by the union, and indeed, the car companies, when the U.S. signed the voluntary restraint agreement (VRA) with Japan in 1982. That deal came about at a time when Japanese vehicles had about 40 percent of the U.S. market, after two sets of energy shocks that forced car companies to downsize.

The VRA limited sales of most Japanese imports to 2 million a year. If the car companies wanted to sell more than that in the U.S., the vehicles had to be locally produced.

The union, and the Detroit car companies, thought that the UAW would organize the factories as soon as they were built. They did not count on the foreign companies’ success in screening candidates for factory jobs, allowing them to select workers they thought would have a cooperative mindset.

They also did not think the foreign companies would expand as much as they have across the South, or that they would be able to defeat numerous organizing drives, thanks in part to support from anti-union efforts in their towns and states. For instance, Tupelo, Miss., near Toyota’s newest U.S. plant, has a formal community organization whose purpose is to keep unions out of town.

(Read my series on auto plants and the Southern economy from Gadling here.)

Tennessee Republican Senator Robert Corker told Automotive News the UAW’s organizing drive is harming economic development efforts in the region.

“Success there would damage the area “for generations to come,” he said in an Oct. 10 interview. Corker is a former mayor of Chattanooga who helped persuade VW executives to choose his hometown over sites in Alabama and Michigan.”Then it’s BMW, then it’s Mercedes, then it’s Nissan,” Corker told Automotive News, “hurting the entire Southeast if they get momentum.”

King, naturally, does not agree. He has turned the debate from one over union representation rights to a bigger question of civil rights, bringing in global figures such as Bishop Desmond Tutu for support.

“If you take away the fear and intimidation,” King said, “workers overwhelmingly choose to be part of a bargaining process.”

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